


it never snows here

by tin_girl



Category: Black Sails
Genre: 'there is nothing important that does not include you' is the most beautiful thing i've ever heard, F/F, Post-Canon, yes it needed to be said
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26553541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: Their first night, it seemed like Max had touched Anne before, as if whenever she laid hands on Anne, it was to soothe her after what Max’s touch had already done to her. It was rebuilding something Max had never ruined, and she loved it, risky as it was, that reconstruction work of being able to put something back together without having to shoulder the blame for having broken it in the first place.
Relationships: Anne Bonny/Max
Comments: 8
Kudos: 35





	it never snows here

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

~Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Later, Max thinks about snow on Anne’s skin and thinks, did it hurt? Surely, it couldn’t have, surely, it must have felt like the lightest brush of fingers, only then she remembers her beginnings with Anne and how everything seemed to hurt her even as she arched towards the ache.

(Back when it all started, Max knew she had to be careful. She was good at touching people (she liked to think of it as giving, because if it wasn’t giving, then it meant that what others kept doing to her was _taking_ ), but Anne— Oh, Anne wasn’t good at _being_ touched. It was a tricky and almost violent thing, closing the distance between them, and no wonder it took a knife to her throat for Max to be allowed to brave it. Their first night, it seemed like Max had touched Anne before, as if whenever she laid hands on Anne, it was to soothe her after what Max’s touch had already done to her. It was rebuilding something Max had never ruined, and she loved it, risky as it was, that reconstruction work of being able to put something back together without having to shoulder the blame for having broken it in the first place.

That, after all, was what she’d always wanted: to fix without having to think of how whatever it was she was fixing had come to need repair, wounds she could dress without wondering at their origin.)

Of course, it’s all about Anne’s bruises and about the scars on Anne’s hands, and it’s not that Max hates Woodes Rogers (she does) or that she hates his men (she does) or that she hates Flint for having started all this (she does), or even that she hates the world for having forced him to start it all (oh, how she _does_ ). It’s just that what she hates most of all are those shards of glass that Anne had to grip themselves, hates every piece of cutlery that causes Anne pain when Anne tries to grip it, too, hates the roughness of the sheets as they rub against where Anne’s skin is still too sensitive for friction, keeps wondering if – beautiful as it is – she now has reason to hate snow.

She hates this about herself, how irrational she’s being. Max taught herself to be an arbiter between her mind and her heart, and it never failed until now, until Anne, until Eleanor’s grandmother’s surprise when Max said no to everything she’d only half-dared want. 

Earlier, Anne was the first to head inside. Max lingered and gathered some of the snow with her fingers, to put in her mouth, a strangely private thing. She closed her eyes as it melted on her tongue, and thought of how she’d only learned to love salt once she’d gotten to kiss it off Anne’s skin (Anne had salt everywhere, at all times, and Max had learned to collect the last of it on her fingertips for when Anne would go, to have something to taste in her absence.) Am I allowed to love you, she thought as snowflakes fell around her, silent like a shy prayer. Am I allowed to enjoy you?

The truth of it is this: Max always thought of love as something she kept inside a box. Occasionally, she would tilt the lid up and let some of it slip out – a lot of it, seas of love, _oceans_ of love ( _leave with me, I have a boat waiting—_ ), but never _all_ of it – and then _Anne_ , and the box broke. Now, Max can pretend all she wants, but it wasn’t Anne who made it so: it was Max herself who let the box fall from her hands.

“You’re a survivor,” Jack tells her months later because she and Anne keep circling each other and the circles are yet to cross, even after all this time.

“I know,” she says, but thinks, _I do not want to survive her._ In the end, that’s what it comes down to: Max’s heart wrestling common sense dead, brutal like piracy itself. She remembers, suddenly, how she once offered to tell Charles Vane how she’d gotten over Eleanor, and how he refused, unperturbed. It’s not the first time she’s thought of it since then, but it’s the first time she _understands_.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Jack says, leaning towards her with a smile that she doesn’t know better than to think of as fond. “Whenever I kiss her, I do it for both of us, and whenever she allows it, which is always, she knows it.”

Max doesn’t thank him, but she doesn’t look away to hide her tears either. Oh, how she loathes herself for this childish love: wanting to wage wars on the weather, despising the whole world for its potential to wrong Anne instead of loving it for having her in it, seeing Anne on her eyelids when she closes her eyes whether she sleeps or not. She’s not a poet, but she could write poems (the way Anne is easily startled into not-quite-laughter whenever Max presses a fingertip to the back of her knee, oh, _oh_ ), and what an impossible sadness, how now that her love has escaped the box, Max has nowhere to put it.

In the end, it takes almost a year for Anne to say “enough” with such softness that it sounds off, as if her throat isn’t used to this kind of fondness. She doesn’t kiss Max before going out on the sea, but she takes off her hat and gently places it on Max’s head, like a crowning. Max, surprised, reaches up to clutch at the rim, lest the wind blows the thing away, only they’re half-inside and there’s no wind.

(When the wind lashes against your skin, do you like it, and if you don’t, do I have your permission to lash it in return?)

“If I were a pirate,” Max says, wondering if Anne will linger, “I could sail with you.”

“You’re no pirate,” Anne snorts and smiles at how Max is still holding the hat. “You’re _home_.”

(Once, Max nipped at Anne’s ear and tried to think of a way to create a world inside a world, someplace they could have each other forever, safe like the inside of an egg.)

So too much love is fine, then. So she is allowed this, after all. So love is not a noose she put around her own neck, and who would have thought?

Max rushes Anne outside, thinking of how, in a few weeks’ time, she’ll get to touch her, and how it’ll be creation rather than repair. Later, she doesn’t have to gnaw on her fingers for the aftertaste of salt – when they drip to the corner of her mouth, pulled up into a smile, her tears taste just like Anne.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! <3 Please, consider leaving a comment if you have any thoughts :)) I'm on tumblr @yoyointhegarden


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